The Cutting Room (26 page)

“Is there some trouble between you and Jeanine?” Alice asked, concerned.

“No, no,” I said, helpless, looking up at them. Their parental aura was strong; so was my need to unburden myself. I could not ask them any incriminating questions. Instead, I felt compelled to explain—and complain about—everything.

“It’s just that . . . I’m having some trouble . . . see, something is missing, and I . . .”

Alice sat down beside me and placed a hand on my face. “We all feel that way sometimes.”

“Take it from us,” Claude said. “We’ve been at this love thing a long time.”

I shook my head. “No, no, it’s not that. It’s sort of a secret, and I—”

“A secret? Oh . . . I see.” Claude glanced at Alice, then both nodded knowingly.

“We know that secrets are hard to keep,” Alice said. “We learned that during the incident with little Orson. But sometimes they can bring you closer together.”

From this last remark I got a nervous shudder. They were watching me in an owl-like way, and I suddenly felt undressed.

“What do you mean?”

“That it was doubly hard to go through it,” Claude said, “having the suspicions we had.”

“Luckily,” Alice continued, “it’s been resolved tonight. And there was a happy ending.”

Hearing this, I fell forward, stunned, and put my head in my hands. That the Kripps were aware of my complicity in their child’s kidnapping made me dizzy. Yet they seemed, as ever, to be forgiving. Did they know that I had done nothing bad on purpose? I hoped so.

Indeed, their smiles appeared pacific. Only Claude and Alice could make stealing the movie—as I was sure they now had done—into an act of tough love. It was the equivalent of sending me to bed without my supper. And it had worked: I was just about to confess all.

But Claude beat me to the punch. Kneeling beside Alice, he took his wife’s hand into his own.

“I never enjoyed a party more,” he said, “than I did tonight.”

“I know what you mean,” she answered. “After we made that call and came in, I could have, well, danced all night.”

She looked at Fred and Ginger, then back at Claude, her own Astaire.

“What call?” I asked softly.

“The one to my doctor,” Alice explained. “For the results of my test.”

“Which was, thank God”—Claude squeezed her hand—“positive.”

“We’d been trying to have another baby,” she said. “And now we will. At our age!”

Then the Kripps kissed, their secret out.

Now I felt even dizzier, but for another reason. I had guessed so wrong so many times in so few minutes. And I felt just as self-obsessed as the child the Kripps had turned me into. As happy as I was for them, I could not help feeling sorry—for myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad to hear it. But I’m sorry I . . . barged in.”

“Are you kidding?” Alice said. “Being sure means I can turn my attention back to the rest of life. Like your romantic situation, for instance. Now . . .”

I smiled uneasily as the two proceeded to lecture me on the ups and downs of relationships, the back and the forth, the give and the take, how friendship becomes more important than sex, and how men and women are different, but
“vive la différence,”
as Spencer Tracy said in
Adam’s Rib
.

“Well, we just hope it helps,” Claude said, at last.

“Thank you.” I shed a tired tear. “Believe me, it does. And thank you. Thank you!”

When I returned to our room, I found Jeanine asleep. Still in her clothes, she was curled on the bed’s outside cover, as if she had tried and failed to stay awake. I lay down and clung to her, like the barnacle I was.

“So?” she asked quietly. “Whodunit?”

“I’ll never know,” I replied.

The first thing in the morning, I phoned the Fair’s organizers. I told them that the posted notice should just say . . .

WE ARE VERY SORRY. TONIGHT’S SPECIAL MIDNIGHT SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

I got out of Rhinebeck the next day.

Before most people were even awake, I had hopped a train back to Manhattan. Reaction to the screening’s cancellation was not something I was looking forward to.

Jeanine had wished to accompany me, but I was determined to go alone. It was hard to explain, but I felt too embarrassed, too failed, in front of her. Perhaps once it all died down, and I had returned to my old life, I could face her again, behaving as if I had never heard of
The Magnificent Ambersons
.

But I didn’t think so.

“You don’t mind staying?” I asked. “Being the lover of a loser?”

“
I
don’t care,” she said pointedly, “what other people think.”

Then she turned away.

There was another reason I wanted to get back to town. I had seen on the news that a press conference had been scheduled with Lorelei Reed. So why not rub salt in my wound? I thought.

The lawyer of Alan’s accused killer was campaigning to get his client declared unfit for trial. Indeed, the woman’s behavior—lashing out at guards, attempting suicide, etc.—didn’t suggest she was stable. Still, since she had moments of lucidity, the judge was being obdurate, and the process was slow and painful. Dwayne Ross, the Legal Aid lawyer assigned to her case, now hoped to sway public opinion.

There wasn’t much of a public, and very little opinion. Alan Gilbert was a film dork drug user who had been murdered a few months ago, so the event wasn’t exactly packed. A handful of Metro reporters milled around the room in the downtown courthouse, where a small makeshift podium had been erected. I flashed an old press pass I had once received for a movie premiere, and sat in the back, undisturbed.

“I’ll make a statement, and then take questions. My client is in no condition to speak for herself.”

Lorelei had been dressed for the occasion, that is to say, dressed down. She wore a simple, shabby cotton dress, and her hair was only cursorily combed. She sat, staring off, as Ross, a stocky, forthright man in his thirties, stood at a microphone in front of her.

“My client suffers from delusions, brought on by years of crack cocaine use,” he said.

“What kind of delusions?” a reporter yelled.

“She imagines that she’s being paraded around like a freak,” another whispered.

Ross solemnly waited for the cynical chuckling to die down. “Let’s just say that she often imagines people are not what they are.”

“What does she mistakenly think
you
are?” someone called, and there were comic “suggestions” from my colleagues.

“A good lawyer?” one said.

Without smiling, Dwayne Ross cleared his throat. “This is a woman about to go on trial for her life, my friends. Surely there are funnier things in the world.”

There was a bit of doleful mumbling at this, but just a bit.

“Why doesn’t he just plead to manslaughter, or something?” one reporter wondered.

“I know,” another said. “If she didn’t do this, she’s done something else.”

“Exactly.”

I thought of Stu Drayton, out on bail at his art opening, and Webby Slicone, free to rampage before his re-election. I even thought of Ben Williams, who might have been enjoying crack that very instant if it hadn’t stopped his overstimulated heart. Then I looked at Lorelei, gazing blankly at the floor—probably medicated that morning—and felt a double dose of guilt.

Maybe if I had chased the murderer as hard as I had the movie, things would have been different. Still, I thought with a sorry laugh, I might have failed as badly at that as I had at keeping
Ambersons
.

“She thinks there are wild dogs in her cell, biting at her,” the lawyer was reading from a list of hallucinations. “And that friends of hers have visited. When, in fact, no one has.”

He turned over a page of his legal pad. The pathetic quality of Lorelei’s life now quieted any derision. But there was no more respect among the press corps; it just meant several people began to leave.

I took the opportunity to move a few rows closer.

“She often sings a song to herself, which has images of disfigurement and self-punishment, cutting and the like. . . . She rarely recognizes the guards she sees daily, or, for that matter, myself.”

Ross refused to answer any question directly related to her culpability in the killing. He did say that Lorelei, who was a frequent figure in Alan’s vestibule, referred to him as “TV set,” in reference to his hosting of
My Movies
. Then there was a long pause.

“Any more questions?” he asked.

No one seemed to have any. Then, just as Ross turned to go, someone finally got the courage to raise his hand.

I caught the next train back to Rhinebeck. It was one of those times when I wished I could drive. The start and stop of someone else at the wheel made me rue every minute we might be late.

If I hurried, I might even make the midnight show.

It was just a crazy possibility, I knew, and one that I wished was wrong. But Lorelei’s press conference had made me suspect, with a sense of growing dread, who the guilty party was.

When I opened the door, Jeanine turned, slowly. She did not even seem surprised.

She was packing her own suitcase, Gus’s nylon container still lying on the floor. Brushing a piece of hair back and locking it behind her ear, she only said, “Did you forget something?”

Like most attitudes of bravado, hers masked a lot of fear. Otherwise, why would her hands be shaking as they zipped and locked her bag?

“I wish I could,” I answered. “But I can’t.”

I came toward her, and she pulled the suitcase away, lifting it out of my reach. Then she pressed it against her chest, as if to shield her heart.

“How long have you known?” she asked, and then she sagged, smiling, having heard the cliché. “Isn’t that what people always say, at this point in the flim?”

“I just figured it out now, believe it or not,” I said. “My detective work is kind of up and down.”

The final question in Lorelei Reed’s press conference had been mine. Raising a slightly shaking hand, I had been recognized by her lawyer.

“Did she ever say that someone else did it?” I asked.

Dwayne Ross had looked at me a second, surprised, as if I were privy to information. Formerly unspecific about the crime, he decided to reply. After all, I was one of the last people who was left.

“Yes,” he said, then paused, anticipating laughter. “She said, the night of the murder, she was passed in the front hall. First by a female
E.T.
And then by Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

There was laughter, of course. From everyone but me.

There had been a woman with Alan in Spain. There had been a woman running from Alan’s apartment. A junkie might have seen a fleeing Gus Ziegler as the Terminator; that’s how Gus would have liked to see himself. And it was possible that Jeanine, the trivial woman, the small eccentric, would appear to her an alien.

After all, I had seen her that way myself once.

Now Jeanine was beautiful, of course, never more so than at this moment, her face all flushed, her fingers nervously patting back that disobedient hair. I would not hurt her by revealing the clue that had brought me back to Rhinebeck. But that remark—a movie reference—combined with her conveniently finding the film gone the night before, had been the goads that got me on the train. She had always been so disdainful of any woman involved with Alan.

“Well,” she said. “Better late than never.”

I would not say a word to hurt her, nor would I extend a hand. Which is why Jeanine got past me and, carrying the bag, flew out the door.

That didn’t mean I couldn’t bring her back. Racing through the door myself, I turned and saw her hurtling down the hall, heading for the stairwell.

“Jeanine!”

She disappeared inside it. Coming in a sorry second, I yanked the door open. Staring down, I saw no sign of her. Then, swiveling my head, I realized my mistake: Jeanine was going up.

“Jeanine!”

I climbed, to catch her. Running so fast, Jeanine lost—or kicked off—her shoes, and I turned my head to dodge them as they fell. Then, taking the stairs two at a time, I closed in on her.

We had started on the thirty-third floor, and there were only two more until the roof. Jeanine and
The Magnificent Ambersons
were about to step outside, on the top of the hotel.

In her eyes, I could see that Jeanine had not been thinking. If she had run down, she might have made it to another floor, and might have gotten away. Instead, she was surrounded by open sky, the town around us, and the gray November day. She turned, seeing this, and knew that she was trapped, and that she had trapped herself. She let the bag fall slowly on the cement.

“Jesus,” she said.

She was no pro at villainy; I was no expert at heroics. So I addressed her, as I had so many situations, in the language of the everyday.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s try to keep a level head.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” she said with a little laugh. “Isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.”

Jeanine laughed again, at my obvious hedging. But I did not back away from earnestness, for it was all I had.

“Just come inside, and we’ll discuss this.”

Jeanine was walking in a small circle now. Then she stopped.

“Maybe if I’d kept a level head in the first place,” she said, “I wouldn’t have gotten involved with Alan. I knew he was trouble to begin with. Who didn’t? But the pickings are kind of slim for people like us.”

“I know,” I said, for who would know better?

“I should never have let him talk me into going to Barcelona, and ‘lending’ him the money for the fare. But the film festival there was kind of fun. And when we saw the name of that pensione, Ambersons—”

“Magníficos—”

“I thought the fun would just continue.” She shook her head, her hair now totally rebelling in the breeze.

“You don’t have to go on.”

The more she revealed, the more I became afraid. People had told me things for all kinds of reasons—guilt, anger, pure indifference—but I didn’t know what Jeanine’s motive was. I didn’t think she was seeking absolution, and that made me frightened.